The Sustainable Development Goals offer our two Conventions an opportunity to help each other in their similar objectives on protection of the marine environment of the Caribbean and the North East Atlantic respectively. This document sets out the beginning of an exploratory process, initiated by the Secretariats of the two conventions, with the support of their respective Contracting Parties. The aim is to see in what areas under the work of the two conventions are there opportunities for sharing of experience and lessons learnt, for developing more formal memorandums to enhance cooperation and also for potential for future joint projects. This document set out a tentative list of potential issues that may yield useful areas of collaboration and cooperation in the future.

Issues identified for exploration:

Protection of Biodiversity
Cooperation: This area of work should allow for sharing of lessons learnt, monitoring of progress, and indeed potential cooperation on actions for relevant species migrating between both the conventions waters. Sharing experiences on inter-sectoral cooperation may also be of interest.

Marine Protected Areas
Cooperation: This area of work should allow for exchange of experience and methodologies on the development and assessment of network of MPAs. Given the huge task of assessing ecological coherence and developing and assessing management actions, there remains a large potential for cooperation on this issue.

Marine Status Reporting
Cooperation: Assessment and Monitoring is a major part of the activity of both conventions in support of their Contracting Parties. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals provide a further driver for regular reporting on regional status as context/support for States reporting on the goals. This provides an opportunity for comparing reporting approaches, lessons learnt, resource effective routes to such reporting. For migratory species this could also provide complementary information from the two sides of the Atlantic.

Sustainable development.
Cooperation: The Sustainable Development Goals provide a clear driver for cooperation between regions on the environmental, social, and economic aspects of the remits of our Conventions. Cooperation could include on understanding on social and economic aspects of environmental assessment and management carried out by our conventions. In addition cooperation with regional fisheries management organisations could be another focus working with our partner RFMOs in our two regions.

Marine Litter
Cooperation: Marine litter is a relatively new issue in terms of political attention. As such, work is still developing both on assessment and on management. Cooperation on these issues is all the more of importance given the fact that marine litter is transported vast distances and the two convention areas are connected by ocean currents.

Conclusion
The full cooperation document on our websites sets out the beginning of a dialogue between the Secretariats of OSPAR and CEP. Next step is to elaborate further our ideas and identify priorities and forms for the cooperation. We look forward to a fruitful development towards firmer cooperation between our conventions, with concrete activities that we can work on together to help deliver the aims of Sustainable Development Goal 14.

Progress reports

July 2017-June 2018

Secretariats explore potential areas of collaboration

July 2018 -2020

Implementation of first cooperation activities July 2018 -2020

June 2018

First proposals put to the Contracting Parties June 2018

June 2020

Review progress and decide on way forward

Staff / Technical expertise

Initial work through Secretariat resources; Staff involved at P3 and P5 level